


The Powers That Be

by Tierfal



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-27
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 14:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is a superhero (sort of).  Merlin is his tech guy (and a hell of a lot more).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Powers That Be

**Author's Note:**

> For Sabriel75, for a charity auction. <3

“Is the car okay?” Merlin asks when Arthur hauls his battered body out of the driver’s seat, pries off his helmet, and smacks it into the other young man’s slender hands.

Arthur knows that this is code for _Are you okay?_ Although it might be code for _I’m going to add a feature that makes the car smack you upside the head next time you damage it while driving like a maniac._ But it’s probably the former.

Hopefully.

“The car will live,” Arthur says. Merlin sets the helmet aside, and his deft fingers run along the creases in Arthur’s breastplate, finding and triggering the tiny latches to crack it open. “This thing, however,” Arthur says, fumbling to assist, “is an oven.”

Merlin knocks his glasses back up his nose with the back of one hand and leans in to trip the mechanism near Arthur’s waist. Arthur has the loveliest view of his techie’s baggy-jeans-clothed rear until the molded chest-piece hisses its concession, and Merlin eases it open and off of him.

“It’s not the suit’s fault,” Merlin says crisply, tugging at the damp collar of Arthur’s undershirt. “It breathes like cotton and holds better than kevlar, thank _you_. You just sweat too much.”

“No need to get defensive,” Arthur tells him, bending to undo the greaves.

“This isn’t defensive,” Merlin says. “This is smug and insulting. I also think you’re getting too fat for this model.”

Arthur, who has one leg still encased in armor, growls and chases Merlin through their subterranean hideout to the kitchen, limping all the way with the uneven weight.

Predictably, he collapses on the rug in the dining room, lolling around pathetically, after Merlin hops nimbly up onto one of the chairs.

“I need a shower,” Arthur pants. “When is dinner going to be ready?”

“Twenty minutes ago,” Merlin says. “It’s under the heat lamps, so hurry up before it gets irradiated, and you end up with real superpowers.”

Arthur sighs feelingly, peels himself off of the rug, shucks off the rest of the gear, and drags his tortured body to the shower. Some nights he can convince Merlin to join him, but at the moment the resident Everything-but-the-Hero-Work Boy will be galloping back to the garage to buff the scrapes off of the car and fuss over Arthur’s armor. Arthur doesn’t mind; later he’ll trade Merlin the technological doomsday device in the trunk for a specialty half-hour back rub. Merlin’s already impressive massages have only improved since he started administering them naked.

Heartened by the thought, Arthur hurries through washing his luxurious hair and sculpted body (Merlin is an unconscionable liar; Arthur will _die_ before he gets _fat_ —literally, at the rate he’s going) and pads back out to the dining room with one of the fluffy white towels slung around his waist.

“What’s on the menu tonight?” he asks. Merlin is curled up like a cat in the other chair, all knees and elbows and magnified blue eyes, fiddling with the inner workings of the helmet, which are sparking and spitting in a rather troubling kind of way.

“Spaghetti,” Merlin says without looking up. “Can you get mine, too?”

Arthur fetches both plates, which, thanks to Merlin’s lamps, are still warm. It’s hard not to start sampling before he’s even made it to the table; Merlin uses his mother’s recipes, and the woman was evidently some kind of culinary goddess. Additionally, as stupid as it sounds, after the many years of getting his knuckles rapped by mansion cooks with expensive ladles, Arthur sometimes thinks he can taste the love in the labor, and it makes a difference.

He catches Merlin sneaking a slightly covetous glance at him as he strolls back into the dining room and sets the plates down. Merlin wolfs down a quarter of the contents of his plate and then pauses to chew and breathe while he twists a few more wires.

Arthur thinks this is probably why they coexist so well—he lets Merlin tinker at the table, and Merlin doesn’t complain when Arthur refuses to wear pants.

“You know,” Arthur reflects once he’s savored a meatball a little bit suggestively, “I’m supposed to be having dinner with my father and Morgana.”

“Your father doesn’t save your dumb arse an average of seven times a day,” Merlin says. He’s probably done the math to prove it. “And I maintain that Morgana is plotting to kill you.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “We’ve been over this. She forgot I was allergic to hazelnuts, and they were very nice chocolates except for that.”

Whatever the case, it’s better to be eating here, with the cluster of sharp bones and clever fingers sitting opposite him; with rich, filling, homemade food instead of the hoity-toity restaurant fare, which usually consists of about an ounce of strange South American vegetables and costs thirty dollars before the wine.

Merlin, of course, presses his lips together and says nothing. Arthur sighs inwardly but lets it go.

“How’s it coming?” he asks, pointing his fork at the helmet.

“If you hit it hard enough to do this much damage to the comm unit,” Merlin says, “this time, you really should get your head examined.”

“What am I supposed to say?” Arthur asks. “‘Sorry, Doc, when I swerved to avoid the rocket launcher—they really should warn you when they’re going to whip out one of those—I hit the concrete barrier at seventy miles an hour, and if Merlin hadn’t installed that newfangled airbag of his, I wouldn’t even be here’?”

“Tell him you were playing polo,” Merlin says bemusedly, squinting at a connection and then pausing to shovel down more food. “Anyone who knows your father will believe it.”

Arthur decides not to have this fight again. His father is never going to forgive Merlin for borrowing scraps and supplies from other projects, fractionally unbalancing the company budget, regardless of whether Merlin turned his ill-gotten gains into brilliant innovations; and Merlin is never going to forgive Uther for firing him on the spot without severance pay, ignoring Merlin’s furious protestations about inventions he’d never intended to sell on his own. It was, perhaps, the most brutal confrontation scene Arthur had ever had the misfortune of standing in the blast radius of.

Better still, he and Merlin had been dating for two weeks at that point. Arthur had just jogged down from Legal to bring Merlin his mostly-cocoa-coffee when Uther and a half-dozen armed guards had burst in, and from there…

Well.

Somehow, it had all turned out for the better—Arthur was still puzzling that out. Somehow, Arthur had taken Merlin out of the hands of the reluctant escorts (because Merlin charmed everyone _except_ Uther, in that uncanny way of his, and every guard in the building had known his name) and dragged him back to his unnecessarily large home up in the hills. There Merlin had screamed for a while, thrown Arthur’s alarm clock at the wall, and then abruptly sat down on the floor to put it back together, pushing his glasses up to wipe his eyes, huddling around the tangle of wires and circuit boards. Within a quarter of an hour, of course, he’d reassembled it better than it had been before.

That night, they’d drunk all of the wine Arthur had been saving for his father’s birthday; and Arthur had lamented at length about how difficult it was to make a concrete difference in the world; and Merlin had started ranting about how his ideas, with sufficient funding, could turn men into super-soldiers; and then they’d both paused and looked at each other for a long, long time.

“So,” Merlin says, frowning as his repair project shoots sparks all over the tablecloth, “did the bluetooth in the car stop working?”

Arthur doesn’t need superpowers; he senses that he is walking into a trap. “Not that I’m aware of, no.”

“Is there a _reason_ you didn’t call to let me know you were still alive after the comm shorted out, rather than letting me sit there glued to the news footage until I learned that I was not yet so lucky as to be rid of you?”

Arthur is torn between grinning and attempting to look penitent. “I was a little preoccupied.”

“ _Hands-free_ , Arthur.”

“ _Rocket launcher_ , Merlin.”

“It’s virtually telepathic.”

“It blows stuff up.”

“I’m going to put a landmine under your bed.”

“Then we’re both going to die.”

Merlin scowls at him, then fishes a small remote control out of one of the pockets of his ratty military coat. He hits a button, and the flatscreen illuminates to show a very impressive still frame of the car corkscrewing through the air, backlit by a massive explosion. Arthur has to admit that the tinted windows make it impossible to see whether anyone was in command of the vehicle at the time, and the situation does look impressively dire.

“How _did_ I survive that?” he wonders.

“Sheer, stupid luck, I presume.”

“You mean the same way I got my hands on you?” Arthur asks, batting his eyelashes. Merlin puts up a good fight, but the little smile wins out.

“Well, _anyway_ ,” he says, jumping up and snatching Arthur’s empty plate to stack with his, “this is going to take another hour or two. So call the doctor about the concussion and then go out and get me more ice cream.”

“Not until you finish your vegetables.”

“I think you forget that I hold your pathetic life in my hands daily.”

Arthur hasn’t. And that’s the thing—it’s the best life he’s ever had.


End file.
